The Puppet Boy of Warsaw (21 page)

My heart leapt, but glancing at Ellie I could see she was not interested. I touched her shoulder, pulled her away from the group.

‘We might actually live, Ellie. Down here we’ll die for sure, but now we might have a chance together.’ I couldn’t bear this trap any longer; I wanted to get out – and with Ellie. She shook her head.

‘We can fight and die honourably,’ she said, ‘the world up there has already ended. What’s left for us?’ She sounded tired, like a very old woman, and when I looked at her I knew she had already decided to stay. She smiled and took my hand.

‘But you, Mika, and your puppets . . . I can see there might still be a life waiting for you. If you make it out alive, you need to tell everyone what happened to us. Do it for our mothers, for our families.’

‘Please, Ellie, don’t talk like this. Come with me.’ My voice was choked. ‘At least promise me you’ll come and find me when all this is over. Please, Ellie.’ I stood there crying, my arms limp, not caring what the others might think.

We only had an hour to decide whether to stay or leave. As it was a moonless night, this would be the best chance for escape we would have in a long while. Ellie put her arm around me.

‘I don’t think I’ll get out of here, Mika. But if I do, I will find you. I promise. I will ask everyone until I find you. If I survive . . . if this war ever ends and I’m still alive . . . I’ll find you. Please go now.’

I pulled Princess Sahara from my coat and handed the little puppet to Ellie.

‘I know you’re a fighter, Ellie, God knows you are, but to me you’re also a princess. My dearest friend, my comrade, my love. Please be safe.’

The sadness in her face choked me. Then a glimmer lit her eyes as she reached out for the princess and tucked her under her shirt.

‘She’s a warrior princess, Mika.’ Ellie’s voice sounded hoarse but strong. ‘Thank you.’

She kissed me one last time, as she had that first time in our kitchen so long ago: her hands even rougher now but so warm, cupping my face gently.

We left half an hour later. There were about twenty of us, making our way through the Muranowski tunnel. I bundled my coat with its precious load into a bulky parcel that I tied on to my back with some rope. It sat there like a big hump.

I lost all sense of time as our little group moved through the endless darkness, crawling on all fours, cutting through barbed wire, wading up to our chests in sewage, trying at all costs to stay together. We moved through this stinking labyrinth, with nothing but a few torches and a flimsily drawn map of the sewers, for over twenty hours, chasing away the many water rats with sticks, trying not to swallow the toxic water. I trudged on as if in a trance.

Suddenly, after so many hours, a faint light appeared. We crawled towards it like shipwrecked sailors heading for an island, not knowing whether we would be met with our death or with the torch of freedom. My heart pounded but exhaustion sat heavily in my bones like lead, and in some ways I didn’t care any more. As the light grew brighter we emerged into a miracle: no bullets greeted us on this warm spring day in May ’42, only a pale sun shining through the thick forest. And with it, the best soup I tasted in my entire life: potato and carrot, glistening like liquid gold. We had finally joined the Polish resistance and about seventy of its fighters in the Wyszkow forest just outside Warsaw. The fighters, men and women, rugged and armed, clapped us on our weary shoulders, eager to hear our story and desperate for news from within the ghetto. For now we were safe, but my heart was broken.

New York City, 12 January 2009

M
any hours had gone by. In the sitting room of Mika’s apartment Daniel had listened to his long tale while the light slowly faded and the sounds from the street grew quieter. The battered cardboard box that had sheltered the old pocket-coat sat between them.

Mika sat back in his chair, his arms hanging by his sides like dead branches. He was utterly spent. He looked at his grandson, aware that Daniel had not interrupted him once.
Like a true witness
, he thought. Mika shivered and wrapped the old coat around him.

‘What happened to Ellie, Grandpa?’ Daniel’s voice was gentle, quiet.

‘I don’t know, Danny. The memory of that night with Ellie is one of the few things I’ve treasured from that godforsaken place: Ellie’s heart beating fast, her sweet breath against my neck, her teasing smile after her proposal. The only thing I do know is this: on 8 May the Germans discovered our headquarters in Mila 18. Those who stayed fought a fierce battle, there is no doubt. But Ellie? I will never know how she died. Did she choke, poisoned by the gas or smoke, or did she die in combat? Maybe she took her own life when there was no other way out, like so many of the fighters? All those amazing young people: Mordecai our brave leader, Ellie . . . all gone. She was so strong but so damn stubborn.’

Mika looked out of the window at the ink-blue sky. ‘We saw the ghetto fires from the forest, a sinister orange light flickering in the distance over Warsaw. Then, on 16 May, it was all over. A huge fireball over the great synagogue at Tomlacke Street marked the end of the whole ghetto. We heard the deep growling of the explosion from our hideout. I heard later that the next day Stroop announced in his report to Himmler: “The Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no more.” Everyone they captured was either shot or sent to the camps.

‘The sky hung low with dense black smoke for days, a choking darkness that revealed to everyone the hell the Germans had created: the thick clouds engulfed all of Warsaw, not stopping at the ghetto wall but staining the neatly hung washing on the Aryan side too. A courier told us that soot fell like black snow all over Warsaw: over the streets, parks and the merry-go-round on Krasinski Square, as if to mourn us.

‘You could say our desperate uprising failed miserably. I lost Ellie and most of my comrades: Mordecai, Alexei, Marek – and yet, I believe the ghetto’s terrible fires ignited resistance against the rats in many places all over Poland. In August ’44 the rest of Warsaw rose up in “Operation Tempest”, a last attempt to shake off the Germans once and for all: the famous “Warsaw Uprising”.’

‘Did you go back to Warsaw?’ Daniel asked.

‘Yes, I joined the Uprising in ’44 and stayed with a small group of fighters, moving back and forth between our hideout in the forest and Warsaw itself, smuggling weapons and people, forging papers and attacking the Germans wherever we could. But part of me had died in that city together with Ellie. The fierce street battle came too late for us Jews. Why did Warsaw not rise earlier when most of us were still alive?

‘I remember those weeks only as a blur. I scurried around, hardly sleeping, an empty husk, held together by my old coat and a stubborn determination to fight the rats right to the very end. Sometimes, on cold evenings in the forest, huddled around the small fires or after a successful mission to Warsaw, I pulled out some of my puppets to cheer up my comrades. They all loved the puppets, but I could not stop thinking about Ellie, Hannah, Janusz and all the little ones. After a while I couldn’t bear the puppet’s cheerful voices any more and stuffed them back into my pockets.

‘In October ’44, after sixty-three days of fierce fighting, Warsaw capitulated. The Germans had beaten us once again, hunting down anyone who still hid in our battered city and slaying them without mercy. We lay low in the Wyszkow woods, while the Germans burnt down almost everything that was left. The Russians, on Stalin’s command, waited across the Vistula for weeks without acting, until finally, on 18 January ’45, exactly two years after our first uprising, the Red Army and the Polish First Army entered the ruins. Our long fight was finally over.

‘I was with a small group of fighters that day, drinking vodka from morning to night, but although it heated my muscles and bones, it didn’t warm my heart. I felt no joy. Our once proud city and Jewish culture lay destroyed – a wasteland of smouldering ruins as far as the eye could see. Where the ghetto once stood was a giant field of rubble; the old town, the market square and our beautiful synagogues all burnt to the ground. How I managed to keep that coat and the puppets through those times I don’t know. I guess the coat became a kind of armour to me yet it felt like a home, the last possession from my earlier life, the last link to my family. I had lost everyone.

‘After the war I spent months in a transit camp before I was allocated a tiny room in the outskirts of Warsaw. The coat with all its treasures sat packed away in a suitcase under my bed. Shabby and burnt, covered in bloodstains and dirt, it had become the only witness to all of my trials. I wanted to throw it away but something always held me back.

‘I stayed in that room for over a year. Not that time meant anything to me any more; it had ceased to exist, along with Mama and Ellie and all the others. I didn’t shave, I hardly washed, and for days I did nothing but lie on the bed, staring at the ceiling and counting the wooden eyes in the beams. If it hadn’t been for Jacob, one of the fighters who made it through the sewers with me, I would probably still be there. He told me stories about America, showed me photographs, said we could build a new life there. I couldn’t muster any enthusiasm. Where had America been during those last months of the war? In any case, I didn’t know anyone in this vast continent. But Jacob didn’t give up. He applied for a permit and got me to sign an application too. It took two more years of persuasion and endless paperwork before, in 1948, three years after the war ended, I left for America.

‘After two weeks spent below decks, seasick and weak, we were spat out on Ellis Island. “Ellis Island”, what cruel irony; me and Jacob, but no Ellie. And when I first sighted the statue of Lady Liberty, her arm raised in a gesture of liberation and defiance, I cried. My Ellie and all the others were lost, while I stood here, breathing, embarking on a new life.

‘We queued for hours in an enormous white-tiled hall. I remember holding my battered suitcase so tightly my knuckles went white, and I sweated like an athlete under my old heavy coat. My eyes were fixed on the large clock on the whitewashed wall as I stood in front of the official behind the desk who would decide my fate.

‘“Mikhail Hernstein.” The clerk’s reedy voice and the thump of the heavy stamp is all I recall. I leaned against the cool wall, clutching my papers, “APPROVED” stamped in broad letters over them, a permit to stay in the United States indefinitely. I stared at the papers, sealed by the American eagle. I knew then that I had finally left the deadly past behind. We had made it. Jacob hugged me.

‘After weeks at sea, New York overwhelmed all my senses – such bustling and energy, noise and stench; some areas even reminded me of the ghetto and its squalor. For the first few weeks I tagged along with Jacob, from his great-aunt’s house to uncles and cousins, sleeping on the floor or on the occasional guest bed. But the more of Jacob’s relatives I met, the more my losses crushed me and the nightmares returned: pounding boots, screaming puppets, blazing fires. Always fires. Here I was in a new world, this golden land of opportunity, of milk and honey, but without a single loved one. I wanted to disappear among the masses, to go unnoticed, and yet loneliness bit me like hunger. And believe me, I tried to forget Warsaw. But entering this new world, I learned that one can never rip oneself from the past, from one’s memory, nor from the earth on which one learned to walk. Like the blood that flows through our veins, our memories live deep inside us, are carved like hieroglyphs on to our souls.

‘I took many odd jobs, lugging vegetable boxes to the market, cleaning factory floors, even meat-packing. I couldn’t sleep much and spent most of my spare time roaming the streets, or drinking in dark bars. And more than once the most peculiar thing happened during those first months: I could smell other survivors the way Saint Bernards can sniff out avalanche victims buried deep beneath the snow. I met quite a few men and women who, after a night of drinking, shyly or with a wild fire in their eyes, exposed a blue tattooed number on their arm. Me, I had nothing to show. My wounds are carved into my heart.

‘Sometimes I tried to talk about Warsaw, but even with those who had seen more than I could ever imagine, I never got far. I’ve never told anyone the whole story until now, Danny.

‘It took me a long time to find my feet in this new country, and I probably didn’t do so until I met your grandma Ruth in the summer of ’53. I spotted her at a dance Jacob dragged me to. Before I knew it, she had moved across the dance floor towards me during a round of “lady’s choice”, beamed her gorgeous smile at me and then asked me to dance. That day changed everything and we soon became a couple.

‘As it turned out, Ruth was a Polish Jew, just like me. An only child, she’d been put on a train by her mother only days before the Germans closed the Lodz ghetto in 1940, entrusted to a chain of bribed contacts on an epic journey westwards. When she arrived in New York, Ruth was only eight. She never saw any of her close family again and was brought up by a distant great-aunt in a small apartment in Queens.

‘We clung to each other like the lost souls we were and married two years later, but the tragedy of our losses always hung over us. Only when we danced did we feel lighter and truly alive. I had accepted that I would have to earn my living doing menial jobs, but Ruth pierced something in me, and suddenly, as if I could hear Grandfather’s voice telling me I needed to study again, I found my mind craving stimulation. I enrolled in evening classes studying mathematics, and then chose astronomy. Just as my grandfather had found security in numbers, I felt safe among nebular constellations, galaxies and the study of the universe.

‘Then, completely unexpectedly, in 1966, your mother arrived. We named her Hannah, grace of God. We had resigned ourselves to never having a child, after trying for so long, but there she was, lighting up our lives.

‘Before I met your grandma, I still occasionally put on my old pocket-coat, and in those first lonely weeks, the puppets gave me company – only they knew the full extent of my losses. Ever so often I would take them out: the monkey and the crocodile, Hagazad and the fool. I didn’t touch the soldiers. I never wanted to see them again. I could never bring myself to play with the puppets again, only laid them out next to each other or held them in my lap – my sad little family.